The book and author spotlighted in this Ink Splat is Lost. Found. by Marsha Diane Arnold. She provided an awesome writing challenge for us and answered some of our questions about her wintry book and how she became an author. There even is a pdf teaching guide for teaching her book! Submit a response to the challenge and you may have a chance to be published online! What are you waiting for?
The Challenge: Break and Fix
Lost. Found. is about putting things right after they have gone very wrong, about knitting something together after it’s been completely unraveled.
Have you ever broken something and been sad about it? Were you able to fix it? How did that make you feel? If you weren’t able to fix it, how did you feel?
Submit your response by emailing submit@younginklings.org and you might be published on our website!
Lost. Fou
nd. written by Marsha Diane Arnold, illustrated by Matthew Cordell
On a wintry day, a bear loses his soft red scarf. The wind carries it *whoosh* to a pair of raccoons who use it to play tug-o-war. When they run off, a beaver dons the scarf as the perfect winter hat…until it gets tangled on a tree branch. The scarf is lost and found by a series of animals, including a fox and a couple of rascally squirrels, who use it as everything from a swing to a trampoline.
When all the animals lay claim to the scarf at once, calamity ensues that can only be fixed by a bear, a little patience, and friendship, in this nearly wordless, clever picture book.
An Interview with author Marsha Diane Arnold
What inspired Lost. Found.?
Sometimes my ideas come from something I read in the newspaper or on the Internet. Sometimes an idea comes from a walk in the woods or a memory or something I see or hear. Lost. Found. was different. The “story seed” came to me in a dream. It was a vision of a bear wearing a red scarf walking alone through a wintry forest. The scarf blew off in the wind, but the bear continued, not realizing it was gone. From there I woke up and had to think about what might happen next. I wondered if a series of animals found the scarf what they would do with it. And so the story began
Lost. Found. uses pictures as a driving force in the storytelling. What was your process working with an illustrator?
Lost. Found. consists of two words, each repeated nine times. Those eighteen words wouldn’t have impressed an editor if they had come across his desk. I had to help him understand the story that I saw inside my head. I had to write art notes.
Art notes are a bit like directions in a script. Usually, writers use art notes very sparingly as they want to give the illustrator free reign to do whatever he’d like with the illustrations. But Lost. Found. was an unusual case.
Matthew (the illustrator) took my art notes and, with his fabulous imagination, brought my characters to life. We didn’t talk about the book at all while he was working on the illustrations.
Matthew kept my story intact, but he also added a few things that heightened the meaning and the fun. For example, he used onomatopoeia in a few places to highlight the animals’ actions. “Zoing, toing, doing” is the sound made when the mice use the scarf as a trampoline.
You are known for your delightful books for young readers. Writing for that age group means you must know how to be brief while still telling a rich story. Can you speak to those challenges for our young writers who are learning about making cuts in their editing?
Sometimes I think of myself as a re-writer more than I think of myself as a writer. Much of writing is rewriting, cutting and rearranging words, and shaping your story.
When I started writing over twenty years ago, picture books of 1200 to1500 words were common, but today, editors like stories that are under 500 words. This can definitely be a challenge.
What I find most helpful in editing my work is to read it out loud, again and again. When you read your writing out loud you will hear when you repeat too much, you will hear when the “rhythm” is jolting instead of smooth, and you will know when your character or plot isn’t working. Then you can write it better.
Tell us a little bit about how you came to be a professional writer.
My road to becoming a professional writer began with my being an avid reader. As a child, I read lots of books. My favorite were about animals, books like Lassie Come Home and Black Gold. But I never thought about writing books until I was grown with children of my own. It was my children and their friends who inspired my first writing with their antics, their questions, and their wonder of the world.
My first paid writing was for a newspaper column, homegrown treasures. It was mostly about the world of my children and their friends and the wisdom I found in it. I wrote the column every week for ten years. That was good practice!
While I was writing the column, I also wrote for kids’ magazines. But my love was picture books, so I kept working on that genre until my first book Heart of a Tiger was published.
I was a “late bloomer.” It’s exciting that you Young Inklings are “early bloomers.” If you love writing and practice writing, you will have lots more stories and be much better writers than I by the time you’re my age. Keep writing!
Is there anything else you would like to share or would like us to know about Lost. Found.?
I love my character Bear and his peaceful Zen-like attitude. He didn’t get angry when he found his beloved scarf unraveled. He calmly picked it up and walked home, to do what needed to be done. The other animals watched and learned from his model of friendly persuasion.
Ultimately, the animals find that, perhaps, the most important thing to do with a red scarf is to knit it back together again. I love the ending where the animals, who have been fighting over the scarf, come together to make it whole again, ending in a friendly circle of community and cooperation.
Although writing is often a solitary act, there’s a lot of community and cooperation involved too, just as there was in Lost. Found. For example, the writer must cooperate with her editor and her illustrator. And there is always a community. For me, the community is my writing group, The Cliffhangers, and groups like the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. For you, it’s the wonderful community of the Young Inklings.
Teaching Guide
You can find an awesome teaching guide to Lost. Found. on Marsha’s website It has lots of awesome activities.
A special thanks to Marsha Diane Arnold!
You can find Lost. Found. and Marsha’s other books on her Amazon Page and other retailers
You can also find out more about what Marsha is up to at her website, marshadianearnold.com
